tech stuff:

I'm a bit of a part-time propellor head and tech stuff in general interests me - This section covers stuff that my geek-side might be interested in knowing about, and unless you're also a bit of a geek there's probably nothing of interest here for you.

Oh yeah, and because of the nature of its content I haven't been so careful with the formatting in this section as elsewhere - it rambles on way off down the page 'cus I figure if you're the kind of person who'd want to read this, you probably don't care. ;)

Having problems?

To be honest, web design is rather more art than science (in my opinion) so splateagle.com is probably best viewed by coming to my house and looking at it on my computer. Any other Mac running OS X and Safari or Firefox should display the page perfectly too, but obviously not everyone uses this configuration.

I've endeavored to ensure that pages display as well as possible on as many systems as possible, however this is the 21st century: If your screen resolution is less than 1024x768 true colour, or your browser is a bit long in the tooth you can expect this site (and most others!) to mis-render to a certain extent.

Apologies if you're surfing on a handheld device (iPhone etc.) because I've made no effort to make the site work with these, and I'm not likely to in the foreseeable future: I maintain splateagle.com as a hobby and haven't the time, skills or inclinatin to accommodate handheld platforms. Yet.

If you're using a reasonably modern (desktop or laptop) system and there's something that looks wrong on the site, please let me know by sending an email to "mail" at this domain.

Me and computers

I do all the web work and graphics for splateagle.com myself and all of it at present on Flash, a 2005 model 1.67ghz PowerBook G4 (running Mac OS X 10.5)... yeah I know most sane people think it's sad to name your computer but I don't care, I'm an anthropomorphist - sosumi! ;)

Flash is my second PowerBook and only my fifth main computer. My first was a BBC model B, back in the mid 80s, that sparked my interest in computers and was eventually replaced by an Amiga 500+ much to my delight and surprise at the beginning of the 1990s. the 500+ gave way to an A1200 about three years later and that computer incredibly staggered on into the 21st century before finally being replaced by Sparky, a Titanium PowerBook (running OS X 10.0) in 2001.

I said "main computers " because these days I have a few other machines which would be considered "my computer" in one sense or another - having the kind of personality I do and working for four years in an overfunded private school which periodically threw out obsolete Mac hardware I accumulated a range of older Macs for use either as fileservers, media centres, extra computers for tennants or just to refurbish and pass on to friends and family.

At points there has been enough IT hardware networked throughout my home to put most small businesses to shame, and I ran it all learning about stuff like print servers, file sharing, RAID arrays and so forth as I went. Right now the home network is very small and simple but I'm also informally on-call as tech support to about a dozen other people which sounds hellish to a lot of folks but which I only do because I enjoy it.

Acknowledgements

splateagle.com is created and maintained using Apple Macintosh computers running Mac OS X.

...the 'weblog' section is managed and updated using tools provided by blogger.com.

Last but by no means least splateagle.com is hosted by zen